


gravity

by merrin



Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV 2020)
Genre: Age Difference, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Eventual Happy Ending, F/M, Found Family, Happy Ending, Post-Canon, death is from old age, if that helps, they're still ghosts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-07
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-16 18:47:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 15
Words: 18,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29829288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merrin/pseuds/merrin
Summary: Birthdays are different when your boyfriend's a ghost.*Please see the notes at the beginning of the fic re: the underage tag.
Relationships: Alex Mercer & Julie Molina & Luke Patterson & Reggie Peters, Flynn & Julie Molina, Julie Molina/Luke Patterson, Ray Molina & Reggie Peters
Comments: 86
Kudos: 101





	1. Sixteen

**Author's Note:**

> Underage tag: I really wasn't sure how to tag this because I wasn't sure a 17-year-old ghost who's been 17 for multiple years counts as underage, but I wanted to err on the side of caution for sensitive readers. I want to be super clear at the outset that in later chapters I will reference Julie and Luke having a sexual relationship after Julie has turned 18 and Luke is, technically, still a 17-year-old ghost. This relationship will last through her early 20s. I don't mention sex at all until after Julie is 18. These are references only and nothing more than kissing happens onscreen. If you don't want to read this because of that, I completely understand.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I wanted to try kissing you. Like. Can I kiss you?”

It’s been a lot of trial and error, but Julie’s phantoms have started to respect boundaries. Their problem is identifying exactly where those boundaries are. 

So while they don’t actually come into her room this morning, they are standing literally right outside it when she opens her bedroom door, wearing only her pajamas and her hair a tangled mess. From the synchronization as they pop up in front of her, she’s pretty sure they’ve been standing there since the early morning, waiting and practicing. 

Her indignant squeak is completely drowned out by the opening bars of Happy Birthday, which they sing in such a beautiful three-part harmony that Julie almost forgets she’s standing there without a bra on. She quickly crosses her arms over her chest but she smiles while she does it so they don’t misread anything. The confusion on Luke’s face when they finish tells her she didn’t do a great job, but needs must. 

Luke tends to get louder the more confused he is, so he practically yells, “Happy Birthday, Jules!” as they finish the last “you.” He moves in for a hug and she knows how much he loves hugging now that they can actually do it, but she dodges out of the way, back into her room. 

“Just a second!” she yells through the closed door, diving for her bra from yesterday. There’s a muffled “what?” from her dad’s room. “Nothing!!” she calls back. 

Thankfully he doesn’t come to investigate. The boys are no more visible to him than when they weren’t corporeal to Julie so it’s not exactly a problem that they’re standing outside her bedroom door, but she also doesn’t want to explain why she’s hugging air in about two seconds when she opens the door again. Luke is closest so she hugs him first, erasing the hurt look on his face. “Just had to get more dressed,” she says. 

He looks down at her dinosaur pajamas and grins. “You look fine. Nice pajamas.” 

Alex huffs behind him. “Luke, she just—you know what okay.” Alex isn’t as touchy-feely as Luke and Reggie but Julie’s pretty sure he likes that he can hug her whenever he wants to, and it’s her birthday, so he definitely seems to want to. 

Besides, for all that he doesn’t seem to like them much, he’s really great at hugs. 

Reggie’s last, bouncing into and out of several hugs with the same frenetic energy he brings to their shows. It’s Luke who finally reels him in, hooking his arm around Alex’s neck too for a group hug with Julie sandwiched in the middle. 

Julie doesn’t hear her brother’s door open, doesn’t notice him leaning against the jamb. “Are you hugging the ghosts?” he asks, loudly enough that Julie breaks out of the hug and looks at her dad’s door. 

“Yes!” she hisses at Carlos, shoving him back in his room. “Be quiet!” 

Alex and Reggie blink out but Luke grabs her hand. “Hey, meet me down in the studio in a bit. I want to try something.” 

Carlos is still talking about ghosts even as Julie tries desperately to shut the door on him, so Julie doesn’t even have time to think about what “something” might be before Luke blinks out too. 

She doesn’t find out for a while, there’s breakfast with her dad and then presents and then Tía Victoria comes over and that’s a whole thing while they both cry and look at pictures of Julie’s quinceañera last year. Her mom had been so sick but so happy, following Julie around, close but not hovering, soaking in every moment. 

It’s a couple of hours before she makes it out to the studio. She’s still not entirely sure what the guys do when she’s not around but it’s just Luke, strumming quietly on his six-string. 

“So,” she says, plopping down in the chair. “What did you want to try? A new song?” 

Luke jumps more than seems necessary. “Geez, say something.” 

“Uh, I did?” 

“Oh yeah.” Luke’s looking at her like . . . she doesn’t know, like she invented music or something. He puts the guitar down and holds out his hand, pulling her up to stand in front of him. But then he stops, and he just looks at her some more, and if someone doesn’t say something Julie’s going to explode. 

“So?” she asks. She realizes her hand is still in his, and it’s weird because it’s not at all like touching a person, but it’s not like touching an inanimate object either, and she hasn’t really thought about that before, and she’s still thinking about that when Luke stops biting his lower lip and finally asks, “I wanted to try kissing you. Like. Can I kiss you?” 

“Please?” he adds after a long moment where Julie’s brain is still trying to catch up to the present moment. 

“Yes,” she says quickly, almost talking over him. “Yes you can.” 

And so he does. His mouth is soft but firm on hers, devastating and glorious all at once. His hands clutch at her waist and Julie clings to his shoulders just trying to hold on, to remain upright. He eventually remembers that though he doesn’t need to breathe, she definitely does so he pulls away and looks at her and Julie looks back at him, wondering if he even realizes how much he just changed her life. 

“I thought you’d be warmer,” she says. Her brain hasn’t caught up to her mouth, or his mouth? 

“What?” 

“I just. Like your skin. Nevermind.” Having caught her breath, she pulls him back in. She might not have anything to compare it to but she doesn’t think it matters, because, ghost or not, no one loves her like Luke does, and she’s pretty sure that’s what makes the difference.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Technically I know that in canon Rosa would have passed away prior to Julie's quinceañera, but I just really wanted to think about Julie having a quince her mother could have attended, so I did it anyway. Maybe she had it early so her mother could attend? Hi, it's me, I mess with timelines to make things happen.


	2. Seventeen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Julie says we brought music back to her, but she brought it back to us too, so this is for her."

“It should be illegal to have to go to school on your birthday,” Julie says, slamming her locker closed. 

“Pretty sure it is in other countries,” Flynn says. “But at least there’s only one class left.” 

Julie adjusts the crown that Flynn had insisted she wear and heads off to the quiz she’s got in physics. She’s got no real gift for science but it’s not like she’s going to use it anyway, except in lyrics. There’s just something poetic about the speed of light and how it affects time and relativity, but she hasn’t quite figured out how to work that into a song yet. 

Later, the quiz done and at least passed if not aced, she grabs Carlos and heads out to the parking lot, popping open the side of the touring van her dad had gifted the band with after she’d finally come clean about the ghosts. She’s vaguely sure that it’s just as much a punishment as a reward, since she ends up driving Carlos around to and from practice and school. 

But still, he’d gotten _Julie and the Phantoms_ painted on the side, so that had to count for something. Alex had tried to get everyone to call it the Mystery Machine after the van in _Scooby Doo_ but Reggie called it the Ghost Bus and for some reason, that’s the name that sticks. 

The door slides back and her three dumb bandmates pop out, already in the middle of Happy Birthday. She shrieks and stumbles back against the car behind her, setting off the alarm. Carlos jumps into the van, straight through Alex, and yells, “God, stop embarrassing me!” as he slams the door behind him. 

The guys stop mid-chorus and look around at all the people now looking at Julie, then look at Julie. “Uh, we didn’t think this through,” Reggie says. 

“I thought this through,” Alex says. “But as usual, no one listened to me.” 

“Whatever,” Luke says, rolling his eyes. “The point is, you’re done with school, it’s your birthday, and we are gonna rock it tonight!” 

Julie looks around but she’s already set off a car alarm today so she joins the boys in a whoop as she rounds the van. She’s still not great at backing it up in traffic, so she waits for the lot to clear a bit more while she jams with the guys in the back. Carlos joins in, slightly off-key, but close enough that everyone just adjusts to whatever note he manages to find. 

Her dad has an early dinner waiting when she gets back to the house. He’d been surprisingly chill about finding out the holograms are actually ghosts, even more so when he found out that Reggie had been chilling with him in the kitchen so much. He’s taken to leaving a pad and a pen out whenever he’s in a room, just in case Reggie’s around and wants to talk. They’d found a shorthand of Reggie moving objects around the kitchen to converse and it’s strange but it seems to work for them. 

After dinner it’s out again to pick Flynn up and set up for the show tonight, just a small club where the owner still remembers when Rosa and the Petal Pushers played there in the 90s. She asked once when the guys weren’t around and he also remembers Sunset Curve. Luke couldn’t stop smiling when she told him. 

There’s the soundcheck, and then Alex says Willie shows up and then Carlos, her dad, and Tía Victoria. Luke blinks into her dressing room for a birthday kiss that makes her toes curl in her sneakers. When they come out for the band circle, Reggie smiles at her bedazzled Sunset Curve shirt and Alex compliments the rainbow she’d painted across her eyes. 

After “legends” on three, Julie heads out to the piano in the corner of the stage. They figured out a while ago that if one of them just never stopped playing between songs, they could stick around in between them, so they don’t have to pop in and out the whole time.

The setlist is perfect, flowing between upbeat and dancy to something slower and a little more feelings-oriented. They close with Stand Tall, which is always a crowd favorite, but instead of bowing after, Luke keeps tooling around on his guitar as he steps back up to his mic. 

“You might have been able to tell from the crown,” he says, “but it’s someone’s birthday today. She didn’t know we were gonna do this, but I wrote her a song.” 

Reggie leans into his mic and adds, “I helped!”

Luke rolls his eyes but laughs and says, “Yeah, Reggie helped. Julie says we brought music back to her, but she brought it back to us too, so this is for her.” 

Alex counts them in, a soft beat under Reggie’s bass that tells her she’s going to be crying over a ballad in just under two minutes. Then Luke starts singing. 

_I’m standing here waiting, all the while you’re gaining  
And you’re still gonna pass me some day  
Our lives aren’t on hold they’re just flecked with gold  
Their reflections so bright in your travel through night_

_But maybe that’s the key to your relativity  
Cuz darling you’re the speed of light and me I’m just gravity_

It’s exactly what she’d been trying to put down in words on a crumpled-up piece of paper she’d shoved into her dream box just last week. She’s crying and laughing and at a break before the chorus she can’t help herself. “Did you go into my dream box?” she says into the mic. 

Luke just smiles and hits the chorus again, voice soaring over the wail of his guitar, and it’s perfect. She closes her eyes as tears start to form and hopes she always remembers exactly how this feels.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case it's not glaringly obvious, the song lyrics were written by me.


	3. Eighteen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Look,” she says. “It’s my birthday, and I kinda wanted to celebrate the milestones."

Luke is waiting for her when she gets out of school, bouncing on his toes as she exits the building. “Come on,” he says when she’s finally close enough, tugging her hand in the direction of the Ghost Bus. 

“Where are we going?” 

“The corner store.” 

Julie stops in her tracks. No way is she rushing off on her birthday to visit the corner store. “Do you want to sniff a slurpee again or what.” 

He laughs and tugs on her hand. She looks around but no one’s looking at her being dragged off toward her car by absolutely nothing. “Carlos is going to his friend’s house and you are going to the corner store for lotto tickets.” 

“Lotto tickets?” 

“You’re finally old enough to win money!”

She lets him lead her to the van and open the door for her. He blinks into the passenger seat and does a dramatic drum roll on the dash. “Lotto tickets and cigarettes!” 

“I don’t smoke.” 

“Neither did—do? I. Gotta baby those pipes. But that’s what I was gonna do when I was finally old enough. Lotto tickets and cigarettes. And I guess, I don’t know. I never got to do it.” 

He’s got that look on his face that he always gets when he’s reminded that he’s dead, and Julie hates that she put it there. She puts her hand on his cheek, poking at his frown until he starts to smile. “Okay,” she says. “Lotto tickets and cigarettes.” 

He does another drum roll on the dash until she laughs and grabs his hand, holding it in hers all the way to the 7-11. He still can’t sit still, fiddling with her rings, twisting them around her fingers, but it’s better than the drum roll. 

What she wasn’t expecting, because she’s honestly never really looked, is the stunning variety of cigarettes on display behind the counter, and she has absolutely no idea what to ask for. “Did you have a particular brand you wanted?” she tries to ask out of the corner of her mouth, but Luke looks just as confused as she does. 

The guy behind the counter is wildly unimpressed with her hesitation and Julie tries a winning smile that he just ignores. “Um, do you have any recommendations?” 

“Yeah, don’t start smoking.” 

She gives an awkward laugh and mouths, “kill me” at Luke before turning back to the display. “Look,” she says. “It’s my birthday, and I kinda wanted to celebrate the milestones. I’ll buy you a pack of cigarettes, maybe?” 

He looks at her consideringly and then shrugs. “Sure, let’s see the ID.” 

She dutifully pulls her driver’s license clear of her wallet and holds it out. “Happy Birthday,” he says and takes a packet of Marlboro reds out of the case. “Did you want a lottery ticket too?” 

“Oh yes please.” Luke snickers at her and she knows it’s because she’s so polite and wholesome. Whatever, it’s nice to be nice. 

“You wanna pick the numbers?”

She glances over at Luke who looks back at her and apparently that option had not occurred to him. “Uh, sure. How many?”

“How many what?” 

“Numbers.” 

“Oh, pick five.” She rattles off her family’s birthdays. “And then a mega number, one through twenty-seven.” 

She looks at Luke and down below the counter, where they can’t be seen, she squeezes his hand. “Seventeen,” she says. 

The guy hands her the ticket and she folds it up carefully in her wallet and pays for it and the cigarettes. “Drawing’s in two days,” he says. 

She thanks him and heads outside. The corner is lousy with kids still streaming out of school, walking down the boulevard to the shops and fast food places along the strip, so she waits to get back into the van before she turns to Luke. “Everything you hoped for?” she asks. 

He takes the ticket out of her wallet and unfolds it. “Kinda anticlimactic.” 

“Not all milestones are created equally, I guess.” 

“That’s the truth.” 

“Where to now?” It’s a school night and the only people she really wants to celebrate her birthday with aren’t able to be seen by other people, so they hadn’t made a lot of plans. Carrie had offered her place for a party on the weekend, and she and Flynn have been planning it for weeks, and Julie is honestly a little scared of whatever the two of them come up with. 

“Can we go smell pizza?” 

“Smell it? Do I get to eat it?” 

“No, Tía Victoria is bringing her pasteles over, I heard Ray on the phone with her while you were still at school. You can’t eat pizza. But can I smell it?” 

“Is it your birthday or mine?” 

He pouts and Julie absolutely does not find it adorable. “Tell you what, you blink over to Roberta’s and sniff for a while, I’ll head over to the beach and we can watch the sunset, then we’ll go home so I can eat pasteles.” 

“And then we can jam?” 

“And then I can do my government reading, and then we can jam.” 

Luke leans over the arm of his bucket seat, crowding into her space. “You know I love it when you get all bossy.” 

“You like a girl that knows what she’s about.” 

“I really do.” He kisses her, slow and easy like they’ve got all day, and they kinda do, but at some point, someone is going to notice the girl sitting outside the 7-11 making kissy faces at the air, so eventually she pulls back. “Go ahead,” she says. “I’ll see you at the beach.” 

He blinks out and she throws the van in gear, heading west toward the ocean.


	4. Twenty-One

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Please don’t ask me about my future with him. I don’t want to spend my birthday talking about hopeless cases.”

“I thought on my birthday that I get to choose the club.” 

“You thought.” Flynn laughs at her own joke. “Anyway you know you like this place.” 

“Yeah, because they let minors in and I’ve been here a million times. Hell, we’ve played here.” 

Flynn opens the door with a flourish, trying to usher Julie inside, but Julie’s not budging. Flynn delicately stamps her stiletto. “And now you’re finally going to drink here. Legally, anyway.” 

“Hey, alcohol has never passed these lips.” 

“Who do I look like, your dad?” 

Julie looks at the mile-high fro that Flynn is currently rocking. “Absolutely not,” she says. 

Flynn gives up on waiting, grabs Juile’s arm, and pulls her inside. “Look if you’re that miserable here in an hour we can find a different club, but I don’t know, I like this place. It’s got charm.” 

Julie checks to see if Flynn’s version of “charm” is working tonight. “It’s got the hot bartender,” she says, waving at Tamsyn. She’s also at USC, working on a graduate degree in health science so she can move back home and be a pharmacist. Julie knows all of this because, again, she’s been to this club a million times. But Flynn is obsessed with her biceps, the sweep of her bangs, and the Cornish accent. Or so Julie guesses from how much Flynn has talked about all of them. 

“Also that,” Flynn says, squaring her shoulders. “And! We can walk home at the end of the night.” They’d moved in together for college, both having gotten into USC. Julie thought about trying the roommate lottery to meet new people, but in the end she didn’t want to risk having to explain a trio of ghosts to anyone new.

Flynn’s right though, Julie has always liked this club. It’s not as busy as some they’ve played, the vibe a little more chill. The one unplugged show she convinced Luke to do was here and it went over so well that they recorded a whole unplugged album and Luke was forced to admit that sometimes you didn’t have to go all the way to eleven to make yourself heard. 

“And there’s herself,” Tamsyn says. “What’ll you be drinking?” 

Julie hadn’t actually thought too much about what she’d want to drink the first time. She’s had sips of beer that she wasn’t really wild about, some of her tía’s margaritas which were definitely better. “Uh . . . something with tequila?” 

“Do you or don’t you want to taste the tequila?” 

Julie shrugs. “Surprise me.” 

Tamsyn laughs, winks at Flynn, and starts building two drinks behind the bar. They’re enormous, layered pink and orange, and absolutely beautiful. “Birthday girls get the first one free,” Tamsyn says. “So do their friends.” 

They take their drinks over to a table in the corner. Julie knows the band that’s playing tonight; the rhythm guitarist can wail but the lead singer’s a prick. 

“Wait, are the guys here?” Flynn asks after they’ve sat down. 

“No, they’d be bored. They can’t drink and they hate this band and, I don’t know, I feel like it would be . . . rude to get drunk in front of them.” 

“Is that whole thing with Luke weird yet? Is it going to be weird, like, soon?” 

“Weird how?”

Flynn just gives her a look and yeah, Julie gets it. “It was always going to be weird. I mean. He’s dead. He’s dead and he’s stuck at seventeen. I knew that going in. But he’s still Luke. No one gets me like he does. Except for you,” she adds when Flynn opens her mouth to protest. “You’ve seen this from the beginning. We were like destiny. I mean you’re the one that kept telling me about the signs!” Flynn opens her mouth again to protest, but Julie rushes on. “But please don’t ask me about my future with him. I don’t want to spend my birthday talking about hopeless cases.” 

Flynn clinks her glass against Julie’s. They have a great time, even if the band sucks. It's hard not to have a good time around Flynn, who keeps buying Julie rounds throughout the night, through the band they hate and then the DJ after. 

Julie gets drunk but not wasted, an important distinction she makes when Flynn asks her later what’s the weirdest thing about kissing Luke. 

“I mean, I haven’t kissed anyone else,” she says. 

“Yeah but like,” Flynn gestures. “You’ve seen it on tv.” 

“It’s probably the spit, I guess?” she says and ends up doused in tequila as Flynn spits. That’s on her, she should have timed that better. 

“You did not just say that,” Flynn says, swiping at Julie’s face with napkins. 

“I did and it’s more than I can say for you.” Julie grabs the napkins from Flynn and wipes. “He’s a ghost, right? I guess he could spit on another ghost, like if I made out with him and I was a ghost? But yeah. No spit.” 

“So what, it’s just his dry ass tongue and yours?” 

“No, it’s like.” She stops to think about what it’s actually like. “I don’t know. It doesn’t feel like that, because that sounds gross and this is really hot, but it’s just not what I assume normal kissing is like.” She decides to not tell Flynn that he isn’t a normal body temperature either. That had taken Julie a while to get used to. 

At the end of the night, she slips Flynn’s number to Tamsyn while Flynn is peeing for the millionth time. “Please text her,” Julie says earnestly. “I cannot listen to her talk about your hair anymore.”

“And what’s wrong with my hair?” Tamsyn laughs. 

“Absolutely nothing,” Julie says, now tripping over herself to make sure Tamsyn isn’t offended. “It’s absolutely lovely hair, do you straighten it? It’s just. You know. Hair.” 

Tamsyn tucks Flynn’s number into her pocket. “Thanks, love. Happy birthday.”

Julie gathers Flynn, who somehow managed to get so much drunker despite having an equal number of drinks, and heads out to the sidewalk, resigned to the several block stumble back to their apartment. 

She’s about halfway there when Luke and the guys blink onto the sidewalk in front of them. She yelps and drops Flynn but Alex, still the best at interacting with solid objects, manages to catch her before she eats sidewalk. It takes some maneuvering but eventually, Reggie and Alex are supporting Flynn’s stumble home and Luke takes Julie’s hand. 

Julie pulls him to a stop under a streetlight and looks up at this face that will never grow old. When he first kissed her at sixteen she didn’t think about what being in love with a ghost would really mean. She’d been thinking about Luke and music and how no one, absolutely no one knew her exactly the way that he did. What sixteen-year-old thinks long term? But twenty-one hits different, and she feels like sooner or later she’s going to be staring down an abyss she won’t know what to do with. 

But none of that is what she wants to think about on her birthday. 

He cocks his head at her and she wonders, drunk as she is, how much of these thoughts are being broadcast by her expression. She doesn’t want to talk about this with him, not right now. They may very well be a hopeless case, but she’s determined to hold onto it for as long as she can. Julie can see an end to this but she isn’t sure that he has the same foresight. “Did you ever get drunk?” she asks, instead of spewing any of the shit that’s flopping around in her brain. 

“Of course. I mean we played clubs and people didn’t really card the bands playing all the time, so.” 

“I like it,” she says. “It’s a swoopy feeling.” 

“Swoopy?”

“You know, like.” She makes some complicated hand gestures to demonstrate the swoopiness but ends up falling into him instead. “Like that,” she says. 

He laughs. “Yeah, I seem to remember that feeling.” 

She smiles as she leans into him, wrapping her arms around his neck. “I like that you remember it,” she says. “I like that we can share it.” 

He smiles and kisses her forehead, her nose, and then her mouth. And yeah, it’s really literally the opposite of gross. “What are the odds Flynn is going to wake up tonight?” 

Julie looks after the guys and Flynn, about a block away now. “Not great,” she says. “Why?” 

“Wanna get loud?” 

It honestly takes her a minute to figure out what he means but she’s gonna blame that on the tequila. They’ve had so little space to themselves that most of the time they do anything vaguely resembling sex, fully half of their attention is devoted to not making as much noise as they’re naturally inclined to make. Opportunities like this are few and far between. It’s a little embarrassing how quickly she jumps from feeling perfectly normal to absolutely ready to go but she grabs Luke’s hand and starts marching in the direction of the apartment. 

“I’m gonna take that as a yes?” Luke says. 

Julie doesn’t dignify that with an answer. She drags him back in the direction of their apartment (it belongs to the guys as much as it does to Julie and Flynn) and though Luke tries to delay her (“What, no one can see me!”) with his hands snaking under her shirt, she finally manages to get them both inside. 

Reggie and Alex are nowhere to be found and Flynn is on her bed and snoring, so Julie and Luke tumble into her bed and this time Julie doesn’t stop him when his hands slip under her clothes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> They don't sweat as ghosts (or at least, that's my interpretation of the Now or Never performance vs all of the others) so I decided that spit isn't something they can get on other people either. Like. I don't know why my brain did this, but here you go. Ghost kisses!


	5. Twenty-Four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once they start playing, they always come back to each other.

“You’re the hologram band, right?” 

Julie looks up from where she’s fiddling with the settings on her keyboard. One of the club’s sound techs is checking settings on the board. He looks friendly enough but Julie spent most of the drive today listening to Luke tool around on a kazoo he found on the floor of a gas station and her last fucking nerve is begging for mercy. 

“I’m a ghost! I don’t have to worry about germs!” he said when she physically recoiled as he put the kazoo (that, again, he found on the floor at the gas station) to his lips.

They don’t have to travel with her. If there’s a limit to the distance they can blink, they haven’t found it yet. Ostensibly, they travel with her to keep her company, but today she honestly would have rather had the blessed silence of the Ghost Bus with the busted radio and the open road. 

She tried to gently suggest that they travel ahead, but they didn’t take the hint. She tried asking them to just meet her at the hotel, but Reggie insisted she’d be lonely. She tried throwing the kazoo out the window, but Luke popped back and picked it up again. She wonders if sixteen-year-old Julie would have found this hilarious but trying to think while Luke kazoos is beyond her.

When he gets like this, she wonders if he’s actually trying to punish her for something, but she doesn’t know if he’d be aware enough to answer honestly when she asks. 

So she really has been looking forward to some alone time before the show, but at least this guy doesn’t have a kazoo. She assumes.

“Oh, um. Yes.” 

“Man, that’s quite a gimmick.” 

“Thanks.” She checks the plugs and settings on her synth and then tools around on it for a bit. 

“So is your real name Julie or is that like a stage name?” 

“Oh, it’s my real name.”

“Got it. I’m Noah. Have you been to Austin before?” 

“Yeah, uh. We played here two years ago.” Luke had wanted to sniff all the taco trucks down near the river and Reggie made them go by the statue of Willie Nelson. She’s pretty sure Reggie’s biggest regret in ghosthood was not being able to take a selfie with it. He’d finally learned how to manifest a banjo and spent at least an hour jamming in front of the statue on it and probably plans to do so again on this trip. 

“If you don’t have dinner plans yet, I can recommend some good places. Or, maybe, take you to a good place?” 

Noah looks nice and unassuming and older than Julie by at least five years. There’s a hint of gray in the scruff on his chin. But he seems reasonably chill and that’s exactly the kind of interaction Julie wants right now, so she says yes. “Wait,” she says. “Are you currently in possession of a kazoo?” Never hurts to check. 

He blinks. “Uh. Is this like a ‘is that a kazoo in your pocket’ thing?” 

“No, I just discovered a recent aversion.” 

“Oh. No, I’m kazoo-less.” So she says yes again. He takes her to a small, hole in the wall place that she’d never have stopped at herself, if only because she’d never have found it. But the salsa is so good her grandmother would have been jealous, and it more than makes up for what are clearly store bought chips. 

“So where do the holograms live?”

“Oh, all over,” she says, catching a dribble of salsa with her napkin. 

“Must make setting up a lot easier.” 

“Yeah, just gotta travel with my keyboard. It’s not bad.” 

Luke, Alex, and Reggie appear just behind Noah and Julie inhales a chip at exactly the same time. Coughing into her watermelon margarita, she makes big eyes at the boys until Alex, at least, gets it and starts hauling them away. Noah has already started patting her on the back to dislodge whatever it is that seems to be choking her and she waves him off. 

After she recovers and he stops worrying that he somehow broke the talent for the night they talk about music, mostly, and some of the local bands that Noah saw get huge. They discover a shared obsession with 70s slasher films that Julie had picked up during a film class at USC and Noah had apparently been born with. Julie gently steers away any questions about the holograms or how the tech works, because she’s found “you know, it’s just confusing tech stuff” doesn’t work as well with people actually in the industry. 

It’s nice. It’s different. And she likes it more than she would have thought. 

They head back to the venue so Julie can get ready for the show. She’s toned down her outfits over the years, fewer rainbows and butterflies, and a lot less glitter, more t-shirts and holes in her jeans. Their look is slightly more cohesive now, even though they’d never really cared about that. 

Luke blinks into the dressing room as she’s dragging her cami over her head. She knew this was going to be a thing when she saw him in the restaurant, but she still wasn’t quite prepared for the level of pout currently on exhibit. 

“Have fun?” he asks. 

After six hours of kazooing, Julie isn’t really ready to indulge pouting, so she decides to try a different strategy: distraction. “I did. He’s the only other person outside of that one class I’ve met who’s seen Scream Bloody Murder.” 

“Oh dude!” Luke bounces off the counter. “Wait, is that the one with that killer kid with the hook?” 

“Yep,” she says. She applies her makeup while she listens to Luke list the merits of original seventies horror versus the remakes of the 2000s, offering occasional commentary about production quality. Alex gives her a look when they come out for their band huddle, but Luke gives no indication that he remembers what he was pouting about earlier, so Julie doesn’t pursue it. She knows Alex (and to some extent Reggie) ends up bearing the brunt of Luke’s side of any disagreements she and Luke have, but there’s very little she can do about the fact that the three of them only have themselves and other random ghosts that have stuck around to talk to. 

After the band huddle Julie heads on stage and starts playing and for the next several hours, all she has to think about at all is how good they sound together. Sure, they sometimes drive her absolutely crazy and she can’t complain about them to anyone but Flynn and sometimes Carlos and they literally have no one in the world to hang out with except for her and sometimes Willie and a few of the other ghost friends that they’ve made as they travel around. But all of it washes away when they play together. It doesn’t matter what comes between them, it all goes away when they start playing.

They hit the four part harmony in the song she and Luke had finished writing in the early hours of the morning she was set to go into the studio to record. All of the instruments drop out and it’s just their four voices, locked together like the four last pieces of a puzzle that make the whole thing make sense. 

That’s the thing that keeps her going through kazoos and tantrums and three teenage boys who still act like teenage boys after all this time. Once they start playing, they always come back to each other. 

Luke takes a break during the middle of the second hour and leads the club in the Happy Birthday song and Julie pretends to keep them in time. Reggie does an insane opera voice she’s never heard from him before and even Alex looks pretty impressed. 

After the final bows and the boys have popped out of being visible to everyone else again, Noah comes up as she’s packing up her piano. 

“Shit,” he says. “I didn’t know it was your birthday. I’d have sprung for dinner.” 

Julie smiles and waves him off. “Nah, don’t worry about it.” She sees the guys hovering at the edge of the stage, just waiting for her. 

“So, would you be interested in a birthday nightcap?” 

Julie looks at Luke. This impatient, imperfect boy who still occupies so much of her heart. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t pull a face or kick his feet or pull out the goddamn kazoo. “No,” she says to Noah, still looking at Luke. She gives Noah a smile as an apology. “We’ve—I mean I’ve gotta get on the road.” 

“Gotcha. Well, maybe next time. Thanks for the slasher recs.” 

“Yeah,” she says. “See ya.” 

She puts her piano and synth in the back of the van. The guys seem to realize she’s in a mood and even Luke is subdued in his post show high. When they get to the hotel Reggie and Alex blink out to wander down 6th Street, but Luke takes her hand and heads up to the room with her. 

Ghosts don’t sleep and Luke has rarely felt the need to spend an entire night anywhere unless they were otherwise occupied, but he tucks her in and kisses her forehead. They don’t have sex. It’s been a really long time since they’ve had sex, and she can’t particularly remember why that is, or who had stopped first. 

He sits next to her all night. She knows because she wakes up to roll over and she still feels him in the dark, his hand clenched in hers, and she doesn’t let go till morning.


	6. Twenty-Nine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I just wish stuff didn’t have to change.”

“Come on, we only have an hour to work on this before we go over to your dad’s.” 

Julie looks up from the clouds she’s been doodling in the margins of her song book. “I’m just not inspired right now.” 

Luke looks down at his own notebook and mumbles. 

“What was that?” 

“I said you didn’t used to need to be.” 

She looks at the words she already has on the page and sighs. “How many love songs does the world really need anyway?” 

Luke tosses his pen down on his notebook. “Well I guess not one more.” He starts plunking at his guitar with an intensity that’s gonna wear his strings out if he’s not careful.

“Luke.” He just keeps plunking. “Luuuuuuke.” Plunking. “Luke. Luke. Luke. Luke.” 

“What.” 

“Look, maybe it’s just not the right time for this song. Maybe it just needs more marinating time.” 

“I guess.” 

“Hey, look at me.” He makes a big show of sweeping the room first before meeting her eyes. “I know you know what day it is, and you should also know there is absolutely no pouting on my birthday.” 

“There’s a little pouting,” Reggie says from the doorway. “Look at him.” 

“Shut up, Reggie,” Luke says and flicks his guitar pick at Reggie. It bounces off his shoulder. 

“Ignore him and let’s work on that melody you were writing yesterday, because I think I have a hook for it,” she says, and starts playing him something on the piano. 

“Nah, I ended up scrapping that melody.” 

“Why?” 

“It was derivative.” 

“Of what?” 

Luke shrugs and looks at her pointedly. “It just wasn’t inspiring.” 

“Okay well. I’m gonna go shower then.” 

Reggie steps out of the doorway of the little studio Julie had built into the little house she’d bought when Julie and the Phantoms started taking off. It was bigger than she would have gotten just for herself, but she wanted room for the guys to be comfortable. They’d spent long enough having only the garage studio at her dad’s place to themselves. 

She’s dressed and ready to go and there’s no sign of the guys so she figures they must have already blinked over, but then she finds Luke waiting for her in the Ghost Bus. She gets in, puts the key in the ignition, and waits. 

“I’m sorry.” 

“It’s okay.” 

“It’s just. Writing with you didn’t used to be this hard.” 

He doesn’t look at her, but she reaches over and puts her hand on his and just holds it for a minute. “I know.” 

“I just wish stuff didn’t have to change.” 

Julie wants to laugh at the irony of a seventeen-year-old ghost who’d been a seventeen-year-old ghost for fourteen (not to mention the twenty-five years before that) years saying that he didn’t want things to change. “That’s on me, I guess.” 

Luke has the grace to look a little embarrassed. “I didn’t mean—” 

“I know. But you’re right. It’s different now.” And she doesn’t know how to get it back.

“Yeah.” 

He turns his hand over in hers and holds it back. It’s the most physical contact they’ve had in a while. 

They hold hands all the way to the Molina house, where Carlos and his wife Nadia have moved in with Ray. Part of it’s the economy and part of it’s that no one wants Ray to have to live alone. They joke that it’s because he’d never be able to find his keys or his phone again, but the idea of his rattling around in that huge house by himself doesn’t make anyone happy, least of all him, and no one wants him to sell it and downsize. 

They pull up behind the very sensible utility vehicle that Flynn and Tamsyn had purchased when they had their second baby. “What are you guys gonna do while we all hang out?” Julie asks. Despite the fact that everyone knows they exist, Julie is still the only one that can see and hear them outside of performing, and even with her translating what the guys say, the conversations are awkward and clunky. 

“Jam in the garage?” 

They both get out of the car and stand awkwardly in the driveway for a long moment. Finally he steps forward and hugs her, quick and hard, before kissing her cheek. “We’ll keep it turned down to one so we don’t bother you guys.” 

He turns to walk away but the way he said it doesn’t sit well with Julie. “Hey Luke?” He stops and turns around. “It’s not a bother, but thank you.” 

He smiles, and he looks more like himself than he has all afternoon. 

Julie goes into the house as he goes around the side. Flynn does a great job of pretending she wasn’t watching Julie hug the air from inside the house, but whatever, Flynn also hands her the newest baby, little Wenna (named for Tamsyn’s grandmother) and Julie is immediately too distracted to care. 

Nadia and Tía Victoria make empanadas and arroz con gandules for dinner. Nadia has only recently graduated to being able to help Victoria in the kitchen, a privilege that Julie and her inability to boil water with any consistency have yet to earn. Carlos and her dad surprise her with a new keyboard for touring that, according to the salesperson that her dad grilled for an hour, is both lighter and able to take more hard knocks than the one she’s been using. 

They sit around for a while after dinner just talking about old times. The boys come in from the garage and arrange themselves around the room in the unoccupied spots but they blink out again when the upcoming election is mentioned. Julie’s particularly passionate about one of the candidates and they’ve heard her rant too many times about his chances against the incumbent. 

They’re back again just as Julie is finishing up her monologue so clearly they’ve got it timed. Maybe she does talk about him too much? Maybe it just reminds them that they never got to vote. 

Tamsyn and Flynn commiserate with Ray about having young kids around the house, warning Nadia and Carlos (who will eventually start trying for kids) about all the pitfalls they can’t have even considered yet. 

Julie doesn’t have much to add and the boys definitely don’t, so she doesn’t have to translate any asides from them, but they all laugh along when Tamsyn tells a story about two-year-old Jermaine (named for Flynn’s dad) sticking beans up his nose at lunch. Wenna’s been teething and fussy and Julie stands up to rock her back to sleep, bouncing slightly at the knees and turning slightly at the waist like she’s seen Flynn do. It’s weird how comfortable the motion feels. 

“Ah, she’s a natural,” Tamsyn says as Wenna’s eyes drift closed. “And why haven’t you settled down, Julie? Life on the road too much for anyone else?” 

Flynn had told Tamsyn about the ghosts, because it was too big a secret to keep from her spouse, but neither of them had really known how to tell Tamsyn about the rest of it, so they just hadn’t. Julie tries and fails not to dart her eyes in Luke’s direction as she says, “Guess I just haven’t met anyone yet.” 

“Do you want kids someday though?” 

“I haven’t really thought about it,” Julie says, and realizes that she’s telling the truth. 

Carlos laughs and says, “She’s already babysitting three ghosts.” 

“That’s not what it’s like,” Julie snaps, realizing even as she does it that it’s an overreaction she can’t take back. That no one, especially Luke, Reggie, and Alex, will understand why she jumped on it so quickly. She doesn’t even know that she knows herself, except that more and more she’s felt like a camp counselor instead of their peer and it sucks. 

But she can’t say that to them, or to her family, or even to Flynn. “We take care of each other,” she says instead, and it’s weak even to her ears. The thing is, they do take care of each other, and Julie doesn’t know how to live her daily life without them. But the idea of tripping over three seventeen-year-old ghosts for the rest of her life, never moving forward with any milestone that makes sense to anyone from the outside is starting to scare her in ways she doesn’t know how to articulate.


	7. Thirty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What do you mean they left?”

Julie has always been grateful to have the family she does because when she shows up in the middle of the night, tears streaking down her face and refusing to answer any questions, they leave her alone. Sure, her dad makes noises about calling a therapist, but after everything with her mom, they’ve all learned to appreciate when to ask a bunch of questions and when to just leave someone alone. 

She goes out to the pull-out bed in the studio to give herself even more distance, but also to wallow in the place that she and the guys shared. Her dad brings her a muffin in the morning but leaves it on the table when she doesn’t move. 

It’s just nice to have a family that gives you space. 

Flynn, however, is a different matter. Carlos must have called her because she shows up at the crack of dawn, an iced coffee bigger than her entire head in her hand. “I did not leave my perfectly comfortable bed and my wife and my children to come all the way down here for you not to talk to me.” 

Julie flops on her back, finally making eye contact with Flynn. “They left.” 

“What do you mean they left?” 

Julie holds out the note, written on paper torn out of Luke’s music book. It’s Alex’s handwriting. She wonders if Luke couldn’t bring himself to write it or if he just wasn’t sure she could decipher his handwriting. 

> _Dear Julie,_
> 
> _Despite how this might feel right now, please know that we aren’t leaving because we got tired of you, or because we don’t appreciate everything you’ve done for us. Or because we don’t, all of us, love you._
> 
> _I don’t think any of us thought through long-term, what this life would look like. And after a while we started to realize that it isn’t fair to you, but we didn’t know how to fix it. We think we figured it out. You need to live your life without three ghosts holding you back. I mean, we’re literally the definition of clinging to the past. We know you’ve missed out on things because you were never gonna be able to explain us._
> 
> _That stops now. We are so grateful for the time you’ve given us. It meant everything. But it’s time for you to stop living our dreams and go live your own._
> 
> _Now or never._
> 
> _-The Phantoms_

“Oh my god,” Flynn says. “They left.” 

Julie just nods as a fresh wave of tears pricks her eyes. Flynn puts her coffee down and stretches out next to her on the pull-out bed, wrapping as much of herself around Julie as she possibly can. And they just stay there for most of the morning. Flynn doesn’t say anything, but she does get up at one point to grab a roll of toilet paper out of the bathroom and uses it to prompt Julie to blow her nose. 

Later, after Julie gives way to exhaustion and takes a nap and Flynn has finished most of her coffee and Nadia has brought sandwiches out to them both, Flynn finally asks, “Do you think they crossed over?”

That thought had occurred to Julie multiple times in the week since she found the note on her bedside table. “If they found out what their unfinished business is, they never told me. But I guess they could have?” 

“Where do you think they would go if they didn’t?” 

“I have no idea. They could literally be anywhere.” 

Flynn looks around the room. “Like, could they be watching us?” 

Julie looks around too. “No, I don’t think so. They’ve never been able to hide from me. They can blink away but they’re always visible if we’re in the same room.” 

“But maybe—”

“Flynn, I just really don’t want to think they’ve been watching me cry for a week and haven’t said anything, if it’s all the same to you.” 

“Got it.” Flynn is quiet for a moment, eating her sandwich and forcing Julie to take bites of her own, but this is Flynn and she’s already given Julie a morning’s worth of silence. “Okay what do you need from me right now? Because I can do aggressively positive and we are going to get your life together or I can do ‘man those guys blow’ or I can do business manager stuff like—oh shit what about your contract?” 

Julie shrugs. “They never actually signed the Phantoms because, you know, ghosts, remember? For all they knew I electronically created their voices. They only signed me and I can still record.” 

“Do you want to? I mean. Do you want to keep doing this?” 

“What, making music?” Julie thinks back half a lifetime ago when she’d all but given up music after her mom died. Luke brought her back from that, all of them did, and it would be the worst sort of legacy if she gave it up again because they left. They all deserved better than that. “This is what I am. I’m a musician. We’re all about turning heartbreak into art, right?”

“Oh good. I thought I was going to have to get actually aggressive with you.” 

Julie flops back on the bed. “I literally could not handle that right now.” 

Flynn puts the sandwich plate on the ground, burps, and flops back down next to her. “Girl, you know I was the original Juke shipper—” 

“You were not, you warned me against making contact with his dead eyes.” 

Flynn sighs dramatically. “Fine, call me an early adopter. But there’s truth to what they said. You’re free to do what you want now. With whoever you want. So what do you want?” 

“Don’t ask me that.” Julie curls up away from Flynn, who just curls herself around Julie’s back. “I have no idea what I want.” And just like that, she’s crying again. “Seriously. My entire songbook is four part harmonies and full band music. How do I write by myself? Perform by myself? And that’s just music. How do I eat breakfast without Reggie there to talk me through toasting bread? Without Luke wanting to sniff my poptarts? How do I drive from city to city without physically stopping them from picking up literal garbage kazoos and putting them in their mouths?”

“Ew.”

“It was just the one time. I just . . . how do I do any of this by myself? Do I even want a relationship? The idea of spending the next, what, sixty years alone absolutely terrifies me. But the idea of falling in love with someone else is wrong too.” 

“So you’re still—”

“In love with Luke? Flynn, honestly I’ve been in love with him so long I don’t know how to be anything else. It’s an immutable law, like gravity. We haven’t—done anything for a long time now. But the feelings never went away. But it’s not just about him. All of them, they’ve been my whole life for literally half of my life. Everything I’ve done since I was fifteen has been with or about or for them. I just. Even when things started getting weird with Luke, they were like my universal constant. They’d always be there.” 

“And now they’re not.” 

“And they never will be again.” Just saying it makes the bottom drop out of Julie's stomach.

“If they haven’t crossed over, do you think they’ll stick with this?” Flynn waves her free hand around to encompass their absence. 

Julie thinks back to the conviction she had at seventeen that absolutely nothing had to ever change. No one makes a pact like a teenager who thinks they’ve got the rest of their life except a ghost who literally does. Plus, she knows them. She knows exactly how much they’ll sacrifice for someone they love when they think it’s the right thing to do. “Yeah,” she whispers. “I do.” 

Because life and the weather do sometimes have a beautiful sense of irony, it starts to rain gently. There’s not a lot of insulation in the garage and they can hear every little drip on the roof. Julie lets it soothe her through another crying jag and then another nap. When she wakes up again, Flynn is still there, pressed up against her back, the soft light of her phone illuminating the early evening shadows. She drops the phone when Julie rolls over. 

“Are you still going to manage Julie Molina?” 

Flynn rolls her eyes. “Duh.”

Julie hugs Flynn and feels tears welling for an entirely different reason. “They don’t make friends like you anymore,” she says. 

“I would hope not, I’m one-of-a-kind.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going to start throwing these chapters up a little faster now, I want to get to the end. <3


	8. Thirty-Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tonight though, she’s had just enough tequila before the show to make some bad choices.

The crowds she pulls as a solo artist are different than what they’d get as Julie and the Phantoms. She’s not surprised by this, per se, but it’s just another change she’s had to get used to. Fewer people standing up and dancing and more people crying over their vodka tonics in a dark corner.

Some nights, she wishes she could join them. 

It’s weird to get asked to play covers of the songs she’d done with them, and for a few years after they left she refused to do it. Tonight though, she’s had just enough tequila before the show to make some bad choices. In some small club just a few minutes away from her house, at the end of the night, she fights tears all the way through a slow rendition of “Stand Tall.” She doesn’t open her eyes until the very end, partly because she doesn’t want to fall into the trap of looking for a drummer, a bassist, and a guitarist that won’t appear, and partly because she really isn’t singing for anyone but herself right now. 

The club is absolutely silent as the notes linger in the air, like no one wants to break the spell she’d woven over them. But all things end, and this silence certainly does, and she bows and doesn’t cry until she’s left the stage. 

After she’s washed her face and taken another shot of tequila she heads out to the front of the house to let random strangers buy her drinks and tell her how amazing she is. After getting lost in the music on stage, this had always been Luke’s favorite part of any night, riding the high of their shows until the sun came up. 

She knocks back a drink to clear those memories and then, when the bartender keeps handing them to her, knocks back a few more.

She doesn’t get his name before they leave the club, but he says he wants to fuck her over her piano, and who is she to deny the man his dream? Especially when she’s in the market for bad decisions. It’s a quick Uber back to her place, his hands around her back and on her thighs, possessive and not quite right, but not wrong enough to stop. 

She’d gotten just drunk enough that this seems like a good idea through most of the steps. They get back to her place and they stumble inside and he kisses her neck and her cheek but it’s wet and wrong and she won’t let him kiss her mouth. They get to the studio and stumble into the piano, knocking music sheets and her notebook to the floor. 

The notebook she hasn’t touched since just before her thirtieth birthday, the last time she and Luke had written together. The slap of the leather cover against the wood floor is a wake-up call she didn’t know she needed. 

“I’m sorry,” she says, catching his hands where they’re inching up under her skirt. “I can’t.” 

“Seriously?” 

“Yeah. I’ll get you an Uber.” 

He seems disappointed but not entirely surprised, and leaves with only a few more, “you’re really sure?” questions, but Julie is sure. Tonight had been an experiment that she failed. 

It occurs to her as she closes the door behind him that she’s lucky he left that easy, and the thought makes her jittery and shaky in ways she doesn’t like.

She goes back to the studio and picks up the sheets of music and her notebook. She hasn’t touched it since the guys left. She doesn’t want to see their notations and suggestions, the places where Luke took her pen and started jotting lyrics slipshod over her neatly arranged lines, scribbling chord progressions over her piano notations. 

But it’s so late it’s early, it’s actually her birthday now, and who knows, maybe she just wants to see how much it still hurts after all this time. They’d finished most of the songs, but not all, and she flips through the last few pages, already crying when she gets to the end. Once she hits it there won’t be any more notations from them, just blank spaces that she’ll be the only one to fill. 

She turns the last page of the last song and sees it. Not a song, not lyrics, but a note, written in Luke’s scrawling, difficult-to-read handwriting. 

_Jules,_

_~~I don’t want to go~~ _

_~~I wish things were diff~~ _

_I’m sorry. I wanted to be what you needed. I wanted nothing to matter except us and the music. I’ve seen enough to know that’s not how it works, not really, and wanting that can only get you so far._

_I love you. I’ll never stop. But I’m just gravity holding you down and you gotta be free to fly. None of this means anything if you aren’t happy. Please, be happy. We’ll see you at the end._

_Love, Luke_

She hugs the note to her chest and just cries. It’s all she can do just to keep breathing through it. She collapses to the bench, the corner of the notebook an irritating point in her thigh. 

Eventually, as all things do, the storm passes, her sobs quiet, and she’s left achy and wrung out, still clutching the book to her chest. She wants to just go to sleep but she’s also caught in this fury of emotion that she knows wouldn’t let her shut her eyes. She’d told Flynn once, several years ago, that artists turn their heartbreak into art, so she picks up her pen and gets to work, writing through her lingering tears, trying to give words to the mess of feelings inside of her.

She’s written a whole album of songs since the guys left but she still isn’t used to the process without them. She wants to show the work in progress to someone, to turn to her side and ask if this word sounds better or that one. It’s an impulse she can’t rid herself of, no matter how hard she tries. 

There’s weak sunlight streaming through the windows of her studio when she finishes plucking the final notes for the song from the ether of her imagination. Going back to the beginning, she sings. 

_Caught in a trap that I set for myself  
Feelings I thought I had killed  
Your memory a mystery I always carry with me  
A hole that nothing has filled_

_And maybe you were the key to my relativity  
A constant I could always count on  
Cuz I’m falling at the speed of light   
And my darling, my gravity is gone_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay so first, please be super careful about inviting strange men to your home. Second, I came up with a melody for the lyrics I wrote for this chapter and I sang them for my friend causeways and I'm super embarrassed about this but she convinced me to upload it for the fic, so ONLY IF YOU WANT you can find that [on my tumblr.](https://urrone.tumblr.com/post/645459444428341248/dont-listen-to-this)


	9. Forty-Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Sometimes you don’t get to keep the love of your life, and it sucks.”

Julie rolls back into town in the afternoon and goes straight to her dad’s house. She was supposed to have been back three days ago, but her van broke down outside of Albuquerque and apparently finding the right parts to fix the new old van she’d purchased to replace the old old van had been a challenge. 

She’d held onto the Ghost Bus for as long as she could, mostly to hold on to places that the guys had been, but eventually time came for the old van just like it comes for all things and she’d had to replace it. At least the newer van had a mobile hotspot so she had internet on the go. 

There hadn’t been anyone around to name this van something ridiculous, and it wasn’t nearly as big as the old van, just enough to carry her equipment and sometimes a companion if she got lonely. Her dad had asked her if she wanted the side of this one painted, but she hadn’t taken him up on it. There didn’t seem to be much of a point. 

She parks behind her tía’s sensible four-door and heads inside. Her dad and Tía Victoria and Victoria’s new husband Manuel are all in the kitchen in various stages of pasteles assembly and Julie kisses each of them hello before wandering off to find her niece and nephew. 

Gabe is plugged into some online game on his computer and waves, but Mari squeals when Julie knocks on her door (Julie’s old room, which is so weird) and pulls her inside. 

“I found a box of your old things!” she says, pulling it out from under her bed. Julie recognizes the box immediately, the things she’d put away when she’d stopped really playing with toys but hadn’t been ready to let go of yet. The plastic horses her mother had given her during Julie’s brief horse-girl phase, the dolls her tía had brought back from a trip home to Puerto Rico that had looked like Julie. 

“Oh,” she says, drawing out the sound in delight. “I remember these.” 

“What are their names?” 

So Julie tells her about the horse named Bubbles and the one named Frank, the doll she’d named Rosa for her mom. 

“Why did you keep them?” 

“To give to you, _sobrina_.” 

But Mari is a savvier kid than Julie gives her credit for. “You saved them for your kids, didn’t you?” 

Julie vaguely remembers packing these dolls away. There’d been the expectation, at eleven years old and just starting middle school, clearly too old to still be playing with dolls, that she was packing them away _for_ someone, even if that someone was just a nebulous idea. She looks down at Rosa and sighs. “I guess I did. But that wasn’t in the cards for me,” she says. 

“Didn’t you want them?” 

She’s thought about this since her twenty-ninth birthday when Nadia asked her. Did she? In another life she could have married her high school sweetheart (who’d grown old along with her) and had those kids she’d been expecting when she packed her dolls away. But did she want them in this life? Not if they weren’t Luke’s. But none of this is anything that Mari would understand. “I might have,” she says to Mari. “But I’m happy you can play with them instead.” 

That seems to appease her, and they play in Mari’s room until they’re called for dinner, which is more food than any eight people could possibly manage to pack away. “This is why I survive on bananas and pop tarts the rest of the week,” Julie says. “I’m going to be digesting this for the next three days.” 

After dinner, when Victoria and Manuel have gone home, Julie sits with her dad on the porch, sipping on a tall glass of Manuel’s famous margaritas. 

“Happy birthday, _mija_ ,” her dad says. 

She doesn’t say anything, just leans into him and rests her head on his shoulder like she used to. 

She can feel her dad working up to something, fidgeting with his drink and his sleeve. So she’s kind of prepared when he says, “I haven’t asked you much about the guys. Since they left.” 

“You haven’t.” 

“It isn’t because I didn’t care, and I miss them too. It’s just—you were so sad, and then you were busy trying not to be sad. And I guess I didn’t want to make you sad again. But can I ask about them now?”

She squeezes his arm. “You can.” 

“Did you love him? Luke?” 

Julie sits up and takes a sip of her margarita. “Damn, Dad. You just went straight for it.” 

“If you don’t want to talk about it—”

“No, no. It’s okay. Really. Just. Yeah, I did. I mean, I do. Like, all is right with the universe forever love.” 

“ _Mija_ , I’m so sorry.” 

Julie looks at her dad and he’s about to cry, tears just building in his eyes. “What? Why are you sorry?” 

“I don’t know. Maybe if I’d paid more attention or hadn’t pushed you so hard to move on, maybe I could have—”

“What, grounded me from playing? Stopped me from finding them in the first place? Dad, it was inevitable. It was fate.” 

“I just hate to think about you holding yourself back from living your life because of them.” 

“So did they,” she says quietly. “That’s why they left.”

“But you’re still holding yourself back.” 

“Why, because I haven’t gotten married? Had kids? There’s more to life than that.”

“You’re right.” 

Julie’s kind of surprised he acquiesced so quickly, old age must be mellowing him. And then she realizes it’s something he had to figure out himself, after her mom died. He had kids, sure, but not the wife, not anymore. 

“Sometimes,” she says, “you fall in love, and it’s the big forever love. And you think, this will solve all of my problems. Love will hold us together through all of the trials because it’s what love does.”

Julie stands up and leans against the railing of the porch, looking out over the empty yard. “I just never expected love to be work. And true love, real love that will last, means growing with your person as they grow, always making sure you’re growing in the same direction. It means putting the work in. And Luke couldn’t. Like, literally couldn’t grow. Wouldn’t ever, because he’s a ghost.”

She sighs, wrapping her arms around herself. “And it sucks. And I try not to dwell on how much it sucks, because I can be happy without him, but it’s not like how happy I was with him. And sometimes the only thing that keeps me going is knowing that I will see him again someday.”

“Is that why you haven’t fallen for anyone else? Because you’ll see him again?” 

She thinks about the few experiences she’s had, one night stands and a couple of dates. It wasn’t fair to any of them, the way she’d only compared all of them to Luke. “Why didn’t you remarry after mom died?” 

Her dad inhales on a shaky breath. “I never met anyone else that made me feel even a shadow of the way she did.” 

“Well, same here. But Dad, we both need to get over the idea that we can only be happy if we’re married or in love or whatever, because there’s more to life than that. We’ve both lived more than that.” 

She feels her dad’s hand on her shoulder, pulling her in for a hug before she even realizes he’s stood up. She lets him envelop her, tucking her head under his chin. “You’ve had to learn so much on your own, so many painful lessons. This isn’t what I wanted for you.” 

“You play the hand you’re dealt.” 

“ _Mija_.” 

“This isn’t what I wanted for me either,” she says, voice muffled by his shoulder. “But mom dying isn’t what anyone wanted for you. Sometimes you don’t get to keep the love of your life, and it sucks.” 

He must feel the tears through his shirt, or hear them in her voice, because he squeezes tighter, and it’s a long while before he lets go.


	10. Forty-Nine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “We didn’t want you to be alone.”

When she thinks about the night of her forty-ninth birthday later, she never remembers the beginning of the story. She’s asleep and dreaming and then abruptly she isn’t, just staring into the corners of her dark room as she hears the whisper-soft sound of a ghost settling on her bedspread. It will occur to her later that it could have been any ghost, really, because she knows about at least five from first-hand experience so of course there have to be more. But she knows right away that it’s one of them. In the soft light from outside, she sees the sweep of his blonde bangs. Alex. 

“What—” she starts and then stops. What even to ask after all this time? 

“Hey,” he says, voice soft and gentle. “Happy Birthday.”

“Thank you?”

He crosses his legs and Julie can see the white shine of his knee poking through the black. “This,” he waves his hand around to encompass her empty bedroom, maybe her whole life, “isn’t what we meant to happen, you know. We wanted you to have a normal life.”

Something about seeing him makes her feel fifteen years old again. She wants to yell at him for leaving her, she wants to take his hand in hers, she wants to turn away and not talk to him. It’s all a jumble she can’t begin to sort out. “What is normal?” she says instead.

“We didn’t want you to be alone.” 

She laughs, but even she can hear the brittle sound of it. “I didn’t choose to be alone.” 

He flinches, moves to get up, and Julie stops him with a hand on his. It passes right through, just like it used to, but it still has the intended effect. He doesn’t leave. “I didn’t mean it like that,” she says. “I meant, I guess.” She sighs. “There didn’t seem to be much of a choice. You guys did what you thought was right, and I can’t say that it wasn’t.”

“You could have fallen in love again, found someone else.” 

“Did he?” 

“It’s different for us.” 

She doesn’t want to spend the time unpacking that. Everything seems more when you’re seventeen, and she doesn’t want to find out if Luke had figured out how to mature emotionally. “The older I’ve gotten the more I’ve realized that some things aren’t a choice. I found my person when I was fifteen years old. Time and distance haven’t made him any less my person.” 

There’s a soft rustle and dip in the mattress as he spreads out next to her. That her bed can give him a hug and she can’t is so unfair. “You aren’t happy,” he says. It isn’t a question. 

“No one is happy all of the time.” 

“Would you be happier if we—” he trails off. 

“If you came back?” Would she? The idea of seeing their faces again, of hearing them sing, makes something at the very core of her ache with longing. But mostly she wants to be seventeen again when they were all the same age and all of this was easier. Because now? As much as she wants them back, she wants _them_ back, Julie and the Phantoms, and she’s just Molina now. She feels hot tears drip out of the corners of her eyes. “Would you come back? After all this time?”

He sighs. “I don’t know. We’d talk about it. We left because we thought it would be best for you. Give you the chance at—” He trails off. 

“A normal life.” 

“Yeah. I can’t tell if it’s actually been the best for you.”

“I can’t either,” she whispers. “But I don’t think I want you to come back. Nothing has changed. He’s—You’re still seventeen. And I’m this.” She gestures down at herself. She knows she looks great for forty-nine, but she still looks forty-nine. 

“You’re beautiful, Julie.” 

“You’re damn right I am.” 

He laughs, which had been her intention. “What have you guys been doing?”

“Not much,” he says, and he starts fussing with the blanket a little, pulling it up over her shoulder. “We kinda play wherever. On the pier, on sidewalks, at bus stops. We spent a year haunting the subway in New York.”

She smiles. “I remember reading about that, didn’t occur to me that it might be you guys.” 

“It makes people happy. Most of the time, that’s enough. We’re okay.” 

“Most of the time?” 

He sighs, and Julie almost feels it across her skin. “It’s better than we thought we’d have. We’ve still got our music.” 

“I thought you might have crossed over.” 

“We wouldn’t do that without telling you.” 

A thought occurs to her, settles in the pit of her stomach. “Alex,” she says, “am I your unfinished business?”

“Hey no,” he says, maybe he can actually hear the panic in her voice. “Stop. There’s no way that could be a thing, your parents hadn’t even met when we died.” 

“But we don’t know how it works at all, you waited till I showed up and found your CD and I just—”

“Then we’ll wait for you again.” 

“You shouldn’t have to—”

“It’s literally the least we can do after everything you’ve done for us. Besides, you think we don’t want to see you again too? You’re our best friend too, you know.” 

She can’t stop the tears. It just seems so fucking unfair that the thing that had saved her life at fifteen might be ruining it for all of them at forty-nine. Alex waits through it, occasionally making soft shushing noises. 

It had been a long exhausting day on top of a long exhausting week, and eventually, she starts to feel all of that pile on top of her eyelids, dragging them down. As she falls into that place between sleeping and waking, she asks, “How is he?”

She can feel the brush of his presence against her forehead like he’d pressed a kiss there. “About as good as you are,” he says as she falls asleep.

It’s the last time she sees any of them.


	11. Fifty-Nine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Don’t cry, _mija_ ,” he says.

She almost doesn’t make it home, catching a red-eye from New York and the show she was supposed to play that night. She makes hurried apologies to her fans online via the wifi on the plane, hoping that every notification isn’t the one from Carlos telling her she’s too late. 

But she doesn’t get that text, not on the plane, not in the car on the way to the house, watching the sunrise over the hills. Gabe meets her at the door and immediately directs her back to the hospital bed in the study that her father’s been confined to for the past eight months. She stops in the doorway, sun streaming into her eyes, and for a moment she can almost see the young, vibrant man he’d been when she was little and knew in her heart there wasn’t a single thing about the world that he couldn’t fix if he just tried.

She still remembers the moment that belief shattered, how unfair everything felt. She misses the conviction of youth at the same time she’s so relieved to have outgrown it. For just a moment, she’s grateful that she’d never had to worry about guiding a child through that particular life lesson.

Her dad’s sleeping, but even in the stillness Julie can feel it, the thinning of whatever veil exists between this life and the next. She felt it in the hospital with her mother, in those moments when she hovered between life and death. 

Such a peaceful moment to kick off such a storm of grief. 

She takes his hand in hers, careful with her calluses over the thin skin of his knuckles. She only notices she’s crying when she sees a tear drop onto one of the bruises marring the back of his hand. 

“Don’t cry, _mija_ ,” he says. His eyes aren’t even open, she notices. 

“How did you know it was me?” 

“I just did.” 

“You always do,” she says, kissing the tear away. 

“Hey,” he says, cupping his hand around her wet cheek. “Happy Birthday.” 

He falls back asleep again, and the nurse from hospice tells them quietly that it will probably be tonight. Carlos and Nadia sit with her through the morning. Father Rafael comes to offer last rites, a process that her dad tries and fails to stay awake for. Gabe and Mari flit in and out, too uncomfortable with grief to spend the hours that Julie and Carlos do. Before they go to bed they kiss the papery skin on his cheeks and he wakes up for long enough to tell them he loves them, that he couldn’t ask for better grandchildren. Julie doesn’t know if Mari forgets or if Carlos hasn’t told her when she says she’ll see him in the morning. Julie doesn’t say anything. 

Nadia curls up in a chair in the corner, waving Carlos off when he tries to make her go upstairs. He kisses her on the forehead as she nods off and Julie remembers being thirteen, listening to her gross little brother swear to his gross best friend that he’d never fall for a girl. How time has changed them all. 

Her dad drifts seamlessly between awake and asleep for a time, sometimes falling asleep mid-sentence to wake up five minutes later and finish the thought. He reminds them of all the best baby stories, about Julie waking up singing in her crib in the morning, Carlos digging a hole to the center of the earth in the backyard, the week in 2016 they spent learning all the words to Bohemian Rhapsody and challenging each other to perform the entire thing, start to finish. He tells them again about the first time he saw Rosa, how lucky he’d felt when she let him kiss her behind the club. 

They laugh, and sometimes they cry, and Julie knows he’s passing these stories like a torch for them to carry into the future for Carlos’s children. Soon, after tonight, they will be the only ones who remember the sound of their mother’s laughter, and it will be their job to tell Carlos’s children, and his children’s children, the oral history of the Molina family. 

It’s late in the evening when Carlos finally nods off over their dad’s hand, forehead pressed against his leg. Ray tangles his fingers in Carlos’s hair, ruffling it just a little like he used to. His movements have grown more labored throughout the day, like even lifting his eyelids is a burden. She knows he doesn’t have much time left. Julie leans in, close enough for a whisper, but far enough that she can still look at his face, can look at him looking back at her one last time.

“Papa,” she says. “Can you do me a favor?”

“Anything, my little _niña_.” 

Julie cups his cheek with the palm of her hand. “Please say hi to mom for me. Please thank her for sending the boys to me.” She stops, and a fresh wave of tears rolls down her cheeks. “And if you see them, please say hi to the boys.” 

He closes his eyes and chuckles. “You hear that, boys? She says hello.” 

It’s the last thing he says. As his breathing becomes more labored and slow she reaches over to shake Carlos awake. They both hold his hands as Ray Molina passes, a peaceful smile lingering on his face as he fades. 

But she never, ever looks over her shoulder.


	12. Sixty-Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She likes her life here, she likes what this house represents, and it rarely reminds her of what she could have had instead.

The morning is quiet, just the soft chirrup of the cat she’d gotten for company racing her to the kitchen for breakfast. No people or ghosts underfoot and no calls this early in the morning like her dad used to do. She takes sips of coffee as she cooks her eggs, a hard scramble she manages to only burn a little, humming a song she’d been dreaming about. 

Melodies come to her from everywhere, and this isn’t the first time she’s dreamed a song, but it’s the first time the song has popped so fully formed into her mind. She decides she’ll go out to the studio after breakfast and tool around with it. 

Mari and her girlfriend Jez call while she’s eating. Mari looks happy and sad at the same time, which Julie understands. “I miss him too, _sobrina_ ,” she says. 

“Have you ever thought about celebrating your half birthday instead?” 

She smiles a bit. “I think your _abuelo_ would be fine with sharing this day. He lived a life worth being celebrated.” 

That brings a shine to Mari’s eyes that she rapidly blinks away. “He did.” 

They talk a little more about her dad and about her plans for her birthday. “Going to go out into the studio to write in a bit,” Julie says. “I had a dream that gave me an idea.”

“Yes but what are you going to do to celebrate, tía? You’ve got to celebrate!” 

“Listen, I haven’t been that exciting in years. Also birthdays get less important as you get older.” 

“People keep saying that, but it hasn’t happened yet.” 

“Well _mija_ , despite what you may think, thirty-two isn’t actually that old. You’re practically a child.” 

She laughs as Mari protests. “I like talking to you, Auntie Julie,” Jez says. “Someone’s gotta keep my girl humble.” 

“That’s what I’m here for,” Julie says. 

She’s still smiling a while later as she hangs up. She misses her dad everyday, but sharing a birthday with the anniversary of his death is just a reminder every year that life carries on, which is something he would have wanted her to remember.

“Love you, dad,” she says quietly, just because she’s thinking about him. 

She cleans up the dishes from breakfast before heading out to the studio in the back. She sold her bigger house after the boys left because she just didn’t need that much space, especially when she spent so little time in it, back when she was still touring. And she’d fallen in love with this bungalow the minute she saw it, tucked into a quiet cul-de-sac about ten minutes away from her dad’s house. She loves everything about it, the small kitchen with the surprisingly large amount of cabinet space, the built-in bookshelves in the living room that she keeps her song books on, the master bathroom with the claw foot tub. But her favorite part is the detached studio. It had begun its life as a she-shed, not insulated or soundproofed, but that wasn’t hard to take care of. Now it’s completely soundproofed and climate-controlled, just big enough for her grand piano but not much else. 

It had been a struggle to get the piano in, she remembers. They’d tried everything they could to get it through the house, or through the fence. They’d even knocked Julie’s portion of the fence down entirely, but even on its side the piano wouldn’t clear the house. Eventually, she’d paid good money to have a crane come out and just lift it over the house. She’d gotten an earful from her financial advisor when the expense came through but Julie insisted the electric piano just didn’t sound the same. 

The movers eventually told her she was never allowed to leave this house because getting everything back out would be impossible, but she can’t imagine why she’d ever want to leave. Besides being the perfect size for her now, this house has memories she doesn’t want to get rid of: Mari and Jez holding hands as they told Julie they were in love for the first time, Gabe telling Julie she’s going to be a great-aunt, Julie coming home with a Grammy for the album she wrote after her 34th birthday. 

And it doesn’t have any memories she tries to avoid. 

She likes her life here, she likes what this house represents, and it rarely reminds her of what she could have had instead. 

She sits down at the piano, back straight like her mother drilled into her as a child, and holds her fingers just over the keys. She strikes an opening chord, but it’s not quite what she dreamed, so she changes the notes. Closer, closer, until she finds exactly what she’d dreamed and begins to play. 

Just a few notes in, she realizes that she’d been dreaming the chorus of a song she’d never even written, just daydreamed about back when she was fifteen. She’d been dancing in class with someone else but hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Luke. It was like the song wrote itself. 

She’ll never understand how memory works. There are moments that have burned so brightly in her mind it’s like she’s experienced them a thousand times over. And not even big important moments, just little ones, like the feel of her mother’s hand in hers, the look on Luke’s face when she first started singing at that assembly. 

She’d had a crush on her dance partner, she remembers that much, she can even see the blond sweep of his hair, but she’d have to break out her yearbook to remember his name. But even given all the time that’s passed she remembers every second of that daydream dance with Luke, how it felt so real it was like it had actually happened.

It makes her smile to think about, this fantasy she’d had back then. It’s not even a memory of Luke, not really, just a memory of how wrapped up she’d been in him back then, and that doesn’t hurt as much to think about. 

She closes her eyes and plays through what she remembers of the song, singing her part of the harmony in a soft voice. 

In her closed, quiet room, the steam coming off her coffee cup dances like it was blown away.


	13. Seventy-Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Does your grandma never talk about me at all?”

Flynn and Tamsyn call in the morning. They say it’s to wish Julie a happy birthday, but she knows that that’s only half of their reason. 

“How is Kensa settling in?” Tamsyn asks, after Julie painstakingly describes her breakfast of multiple flavors of pop tarts to them. 

“Oh, she’s fine, almost got her a spot in the shed cleared out.” 

“Oh stop.” 

“No really. I had to move the lawnmower to the garage but sacrifices must be made.” 

“Julie, I know you’re kidding but Tamsyn is hyperventilating so—”

“Please tell Tamsyn that her granddaughter is settling into my guest room just fine. I let her put a grocery order in so she can have her favorites in the kitchen.” 

“You’ll finally have to share your pop tarts.” 

“She better not touch my pop tarts.” 

Julie can hear Tamsyn from further away. “Tell her that Kensa’s first classes are tomorrow and—” 

Julie cuts in over Tamsyn. “That child is an actual adult, if she can’t get herself up for class there’s not much I can do for her.” 

To Tamsyn, Flynn repeats, “Julie says she has it, don’t worry.” 

“I didn’t say that.” 

“But you do have it, right, Julie?” Flynn says. 

Julie sighs. “I’ll make sure she gets up. What time is it in Cornwall anyway?”

“I can’t tell if it’s too late or too early but either way I should be sleeping. I’ll check in with you all tomorrow. Later today? One of those.” 

Julie smiles and hangs up. She tries to picture Flynn and her leopard print and bright colors in Cornwall and gives up when it starts to hurt her brain. She and Tamsyn sound happy though and that’s certainly enough for Julie. 

Doing her due diligence to her oldest friend, she goes off in search of Kensa. She doesn’t have to look far, Kensa has apparently abandoned unpacking and is closely examining every framed picture Julie has hung in her hallway. Julie’s lived a lot of life, so there are quite a few. “You doing okay, kiddo?”

Kensa nods and shoots her a thumbs up, so Julie leaves her to it. She’s almost back to the kitchen when she hears Kensa shriek, “Auntie Julie, you were in a band?” 

“Does your grandma never talk about me at all?”

“Of course she does, but she didn’t tell me about your band.” 

“I also won a Grammy, do you want to shriek about that?” 

Kensa waves her suggestion away. “Gram has a picture of you and your Grammy framed in her house, I already knew about that. I didn’t know about this.” 

Julie looks at the picture in question. She remembers the show, her seventeenth birthday when Luke had surprised her with the song he and Reggie wrote. She’s got rainbow makeup over her eyes and a sequined jacket. Luke, as usual, is in one of his ragged shirts with the arms cut off. She trails her fingers over the glass in the frame. “It was a long time ago,” she says to Kensa. 

“How long?” 

“Oh, the band broke up just before my thirtieth birthday, in 2035.” 

“What was your sound like?” 

“I can just show you,” Julie says, and Kensa follows Julie back out to the computer in the living room. Technology has changed so much over the years, but Julie still has the old videos they’d uploaded to YouTube. Technology being what it is now, Kensa doesn’t even seem phased when the boys pop in and out of existence, and she laughs as the crowd gasps every time it happens. 

“I’ll have you know that was a difficult trick to pull off back in the day,” Julie grumbles. 

“Who knew oldies could jam this hard,” Kensa says, and Julie rolls her eyes. Youth. “That one is definitely into you,” she adds, pointing at Luke on the screen. 

“Oh he was.” 

Kensa leans back from the screen and looks at Julie. “Were you into him too?”

Julie nods. “Very much so.” 

“What happened?”

Julie absolutely does not want to tell the whole sordid tale that she can’t even explain properly, so she goes with the lie they told everyone. “He lived in another country, had his own life. It just didn’t work out.” 

“That sucks.” 

She laughs. What an understatement. “Yeah, it did. But it was a dream come true while it lasted. Everything seems so full of possibility when you’re seventeen.” 

“Tell me about him.” 

Julie pauses for a moment, wondering how to put Luke into words this child will understand. “One day,” she finally says, “you’re going to meet someone who, without even realizing it, changes the course of your life forever. For the rest of your life, that person is going to be your center of gravity. You aren’t living _for_ them, because that’s a whole other mess. But you’re going to live your life in such a way that you will always be in their orbit. And if you’re lucky, they’ll do the same for you.” 

She watches the recordings of herself and the boys, and for a moment it’s like being back on that stage, her whole life ahead of her and no reason anything should ever change. It’s like she can feel that swooping feeling whenever Luke caught her eyes across the stage again. “He had this way of looking at me,” she says, “that let me know I existed. That I mattered.”

She looks at Kensa then, and Kensa is looking back at her, jaw dropped. She looks so much like Flynn sometimes that it’s hard not to picture Flynn at fifteen, finding out ghosts are real and Julie’s in a band with some. “You still love him,” she says. 

Julie shrugs. “You never really fall out of love with people. That’s another lesson no one ever tells you.” 

“You should find him, see if he still feels the same way.” 

“He died long ago.” Kensa visibly deflates. “Sometimes there’s no fairy tale ending, there’s just life. That’s—” 

“Another lesson, got it.” 

Kensa looks so disappointed that Julie gives her a quick hug. “It’s okay,” she says. “I made my peace with my life a long time ago, and I’ve lived a good one. Maybe it could have been something more, something different, but we’ll never know, and that’s alright.” 

Kensa nods, but Julie can tell it’s going to have to be a lesson that life teaches her, just like it taught Julie. She just hopes that Kensa gets the fairy tale ending that Julie hasn’t yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a line in here that I cribbed off of Super 8, which I was watching when I was writing and I just really loved. It's not exact, but this is the line from the movie: "She used to look at me... this way, like really look... and I just knew I was there... that I existed."


	14. Eighty-Nine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Mostly, I just want to see you again."

Julie has another birthday. She can’t rightly recall which one it is, she stopped tracking them a while ago and can't readily tell people her age unless she does the math. Age has become almost meaningless, like so many other things. 

She wakes up but she doesn’t get up, waiting for Mari or Jez to come and help her. Nadia had moved in with Gabe after Carlos passed two years ago, back into the house they’d grown up in, and Mari had asked Julie to come and live with her. “Let me take care of you, Tía Julia.”

Julie had protested that she didn’t need someone to take care of her, she was perfectly capable, but she knew it wasn’t true. She’d been more forgetful of late, and not like, “I can’t remember where my keys are” but like, “I almost burned the house down because I forgot about a pot of soup.” Luckily, she didn’t burn the house down, and she’d made a good amount selling it to a young couple. The grand piano had been lifted back over the house and deposited back in the studio with Gabe and his family. Julie has taught the kids to play over the years, and they’ve taught their kids, and she knows her mother would be so pleased that her legacy has continued to be handed down. 

Either way, the protest was only token, family takes care of family, and when the time came she didn’t mind. She had loved her independence over the years, having only herself to worry about and clean up after, but she’d missed having people to talk to, unplanned conversations she didn’t have to start with a phone call. Jez plays the guitar and they’ll sit in the living room some nights and sing until Julie’s nodding off in her arm chair. It’s nice having people to look after her. 

Mari appears in the doorway before too much longer. If Julie ever wants to feel super old, she can just look at her niece and see how time has taken its toll on this child she’s known since her birth. She’s an active fifty-four, but she’s still fifty-four with laugh lines around her eyes and streaks of gray in her hair. “You ready to get up, Tía?” she asks, standing over Julie’s bed. 

“I suppose I am,” Julie says. Movement is a struggle some days, just getting up and dressed and out to the couch is enough to warrant a nap, and she intends to nap as much as she wants. It’s her birthday. 

Mari makes her pancakes instead of the egg whites that the doctor ordered last time Julie went in. She puts a candle in the center of the pancakes and has Julie blow it out before she drizzles the syrup. Julie can’t possibly finish all that Mari put on her plate, her stomach has shrunk along with her attention span. 

She goes out to the sunroom after breakfast to sit in any errant beam that makes its way through the palm trees. The room stays warmer than the rest of the house generally does this time of year, and Mari tucks a throw blanket under her thighs before going back into the house. Mari’s been able to work from home since Julie moved in, which means she’s never alone. It’s good and bad some days, but mostly good. 

Julie used to value alone time more than she does now, more than she has for a while. When she had three ghosts living with her that never went away because no one could see them but her, quiet moments to herself were so few and far between that she cherished each one like the gift it was. But she hasn’t had a problem finding solitude since then. 

_We’ll see you at the end_ , Luke had written in a note to her. She knows he meant it to be comforting, that they would be waiting for her at the end of her life. But she looks down at her hands now, gnarled with age and arthritis, and she wonders if these are the hands she’ll have in her afterlife. The boys never changed, never got older. What if they’re still out of sync, even when they’re all dead? Will she even be a ghost? What unfinished business does she have left, except meeting up with the three boys she hasn’t seen in almost sixty years? 

What if she misses them entirely and doesn’t linger? Will she find them again? What if they moved on and didn’t (or couldn’t) tell her? 

Julie gets up to close the door to the main house, just to give herself a little more privacy. Mari normally leaves it open so she can hear Julie if she needs anything, but that’s not what Julie wants right now. She sits back down. 

“I don’t know if you can hear me. If you’re waiting around, or if you’re away like you said you’d be.” 

She waits for a moment. She doesn’t know how she’d know if they were around and listening, if they’re still visible to her after all this time or not. “I’m scared,” she says. “Scared I won’t see you again, that I’ll look like this forever, that I’ll bypass limbo and go straight to whatever comes after.” She remembers the look on Luke’s face when he’d described the possibilities before she’d cured them of Caleb’s stamp, the trepidation on his face when he talked about crossing over. He’d been joking about going to a heaven, but none of them really knows.

She takes a few deep breaths. She used to be able to sing all night long and now a few sentences have her gasping. “I have so much to tell you all about my life. So many things I thought I’d share with you that I couldn’t. I wanted you to be there. I missed you so much.” 

Music starts in the other room, one of Julie’s albums from after she’d started releasing as Molina. 

“Does it hurt?” she wonders. “Did it, when you all died? Did you feel alone? I think that might be what worries me the most now.” 

She coughs a little, her throat feeling the burden of overuse. She takes a sip of the tea that Mari had placed on the table beside her. 

“I don’t know what I’m asking for,” she says. “Maybe just to know that you’re still there, that you’re waiting for me. That I will see you again, at the end. Mostly, I just want to see you again.” 

She stops talking, straining to feel or see or hear anything out of the ordinary. Maybe it’s the stillness and the quiet. Maybe it’s that here at the end of her life, the veil between this life and the next is thin, just like she’d noticed with her mom and dad. She doesn’t see them, but she feels them, Reggie and Alex’s hands in hers, Luke’s arm across her shoulders, his forehead pressed against her cheek. With her again, here at the end. 

Julie smiles, closes her eyes, and goes to sleep.


	15. After

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She's home.

The fates, or whoever it is that controls these things, are kind to her. 

When Julie opens her eyes again, the first face she sees is Luke’s, tears in his eyes and a smile brighter than the sun. His hands on hers are solid and warm, so different even than they’d felt when he’d become corporeal to her. She sits up, pulling her hands out of his to put them on his face, to touch his smile and know it’s real, to wipe at the tears dripping down his cheeks. 

And then she sees her hands. Not the old, callused fingers bent almost sideways from long years of playing instruments. These hands are young, fingers straight with too many rings on them, the hands that first held Luke’s after their show at the Orpheum. She looks down at the rest of her body, touches her own face, and laughs. Laughs and keeps on laughing. She’s young again, she’s seventeen, and she’s finally back with her boys. 

She jumps up. They’re just outside the sunroom at Mari’s house, in a tight knot among the palm trees. She starts to look over her shoulder, into the room, but thinks better of it. She knows where she’s been, now she’s more interested in what’s in front of her. She throws herself into Luke, arms tight around his neck, and then she feels Reggie and Alex hug them both, and it’s the family circle she remembers from so long ago. 

“You waited,” she says after stepping back, almost breathless with tears. 

“We told you we would,” Reggie says, almost indignant. She hugs him, and then she hugs Alex, and then she hugs all of them again. 

“Have you seen my dad? Carlos?” 

Luke nods and takes her hands again. “Your dad passed through. It was wild to actually meet him. We talked about you a lot.”

“I finally got to give him a real hug!” Reggie says. “It was nice, exactly like I’d imagined.”

“I bet he was so excited to finally meet you guys.” 

Reggie nods. “He was. He’s such a good dad.” 

Luke nods. “He stuck around to make sure that you and Carlos were all right, I think that must have been his unfinished business. But after a little while he started feeling, I guess he called it a tug? And he really missed your mom. So he crossed over.” 

“And Carlos?” 

“He’s still here,” Alex says. “We think he’s waiting for Nadia.” 

Tears sting Julie’s eyes again, joining the deluge already on her face. “That sounds like him.”

They hug some more, and then Alex and Reggie blink out, and then Julie kisses Luke for what feels like years. It’s different than it had been when she was alive and he was a ghost, but it’s not like the times she kissed people after he left either. She’d never gotten used to how wet people’s mouths are, like, all the time and she just hadn’t liked kissing much after Luke left. He really had ruined her for anyone that came after him. She had assumed it would be different when they were both ghosts and it is but also it isn't and she’s actually super happy, in the few moments she lets herself think about it, that spit isn’t something she’s going to have to get used to. 

It’s just warm, finally, and as their arms close around each other it’s like puzzle pieces locking into place. This is where she’s always belonged and she’ll never have to lose this again. Luke kisses her like she’s air and he’s drowning, like she’s something vital and necessary that he’d been without for too long. She buries her hands in his hair and kisses him back and it’s wild how her hands have never forgotten the particular shape of his skull, the scruff at the back of his neck that never grows any longer. 

Eventually, they break apart. “We’ve got the rest of our afterlives,” Luke says, laughing. They find Reggie and Alex and the boys help her practice blinking around and she has to agree with Alex that it tingles in the strangest places. They show her the subway in New York where they played for a while, and then they pop up to the top of the Eiffel Tower, just because they can. 

Julie visits Flynn and Tamsyn, but they can’t see or hear her and it just makes her sad. She goes to see Carlos and he’s still a little old man. They laugh and hug and he teases her for all the sparkles on her jacket and she pokes fun at his bald spot. He doesn’t want to leave Nadia though, so eventually Julie tells him she’ll see him later and blinks away. 

They go to the Grand Canyon, to the Arctic Circle for the northern lights, to the middle of a volcano, and then to Julie’s family’s old place in Puerto Rico. Anyone who would remember Julie’s parents before they left is long gone, but she finds their names in the family’s Bible and that’s comforting to her anyway. 

Sometimes she and Luke leave Alex and Reggie to entertain themselves and they go on ghost dates, like to that little room in Cinderella’s castle at Disneyland, or the gardens at the Summer Palace in St. Petersburg. They have sex anywhere they feel like because no one can see them except other ghosts, and Luke’s gotten pretty good over the years at sensing when others are around. 

Julie had never been particularly adventurous about sex when she was alive, but not being confined by things like visibility or accessibility have really opened up a lot of possibilities for them both. She draws the line at having sex when she can see people though, it feels way too weird. 

There are fewer ghosts in the world than Julie would have thought, if she’d given much thought to it at all. “I guess not that many people have unfinished business, or they figure it out pretty quick,” Luke says when she asks about it. 

“I didn’t want to ask in front of Alex, but what happened to Willie, why haven’t I met him yet?” 

“Oh, so he’d known what his unfinished business was for a while, but Caleb had his soul so he couldn’t cross over. He waited for, like, a long time after he got it back from Caleb to cross over, but he eventually did, just a little while ago. Alex misses him but they’ll see each other again.” 

“Wait so did you guys ever figure out what your unfinished business is? How will I know what mine is?” 

Luke just shrugs but Julie wonders if there’s something about all of this that they’ve figured out while they were apart. She could make a fuss about it, but honestly, she just doesn’t care enough to. Given everything, being stuck as a ghost with your three best friends isn’t the worst way to spend your afterlife. 

She discovers that she can call her piano like the boys can call their instruments, and they spend some time playing music together. No one can see them anymore, but everyone can hear them. Alex was right, it’s not quite the same, but it’s close. 

She has no idea how many years pass like that. The sun rises and sets, Nadia passes on and she and Carlos cross over. Fashions change and new things are built and old things are torn down and through it all, Julie and the boys play their music and make people smile and dance for a little while. Sometimes they make people cry, but Julie thinks that’s good for people sometimes too. Time ceases to have any real meaning for them. 

One night, or early morning, they’re sitting on top of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. It had once been the tallest building in the world, and it still has an amazing view of the sunrise. Julie has her hand in Luke’s and her head on Reggie’s shoulder. Alex is tucked in on Luke’s other side. All connected, Julie and her boys. 

“Why do you think I aged back?” she asks. It hasn’t been bothering her, not really, but it’s a question she doesn’t know where to find the answer to, and that’s never sat well with her. 

Luke squeezes her hand tighter. “I think we’re soulmates. All of us. And I think your soul matched itself to ours.” 

“That’s beautiful,” Reggie says, sniffling. 

“It sounds right,” Alex says. “We’ve known for a while that we were waiting for you.” 

If she still had a stomach the bottom would have dropped out of it. She sits up, and only Reggie grabbing onto her arm and Luke’s grip on her hand keep her from flying off the top of the Burj Khalifa. “But you told me—”

“I did.” 

“Alex, you promised me—” 

Alex reaches around Luke and cups her shoulder. “I told you what you needed to hear on your forty-ninth birthday.” And god that’s weird. She’d had a forty-ninth birthday. She remembered her forty-ninth birthday and now she was seventeen again and would be forever.

“You’re not mad, are you?” Luke asks. 

“No, of course not.” She laughs and cries a little bit, an emotion she’s gotten so used to over the years, and she hugs them all a little closer, these boys who waited. 

Luke kisses her on the cheek in the middle of the hug and says quietly, “The universe was just correcting the mistake of us being born so far apart.” 

“So what’s my unfinished business? When do we cross over, if yours is fulfilled now?” 

“We don’t really know exactly how it works yet. Just that at some point, after you’ve completed your unfinished business, you can basically decide you’re ready, and you’ll feel it start.” 

Julie nods. It makes a certain kind of sense. And so it follows that, some time later when Julie starts feeling the tug in her belly, the rest of them do too. It makes Reggie nervous, but Julie reminds him that the universe wouldn’t have pulled this many strings to get them together only to pull them apart again, and that seems to make him feel better. They give in to the tugs at the same time, holding hands in a circle. 

The tug pulls them down a long tunnel of endless white but the whole time, Julie feels the boys’ hands in hers, and then she opens her eyes again. 

The first person she sees over Reggie’s shoulder is her mom, smiling that smile that Julie remembers so well. She looks exactly like she did before she got sick, before the illness took her strength and vitality. Julie doesn’t even remember rushing over to her and then she’s in her mother’s arms again, like the final piece of the puzzle of her life suddenly completing the whole picture. Her dad comes up behind her and maybe there’s something to what Luke said about the universe fixing their ages, because her dad looks younger too, just about the same age he’d been when Julie was fourteen. She hugs them both and then Carlos and Nadia are there and they’re still old but spry, and Carlos’ arms are strong around her when they hug. 

Tía Victoria is there and the grandma in Puerto Rico that Julie only met once. Julie sees Luke hugging the Pattersons, and Alex and Reggie each in the middle of a knot of people who are probably related. A young guy that Julie assumes is Willie based solely on a rough description from Reggie appears at the edge of the cluster of families and Alex tackles him to whatever passes for a ground. There are tears and laughter and reunions Julie didn’t think she’d ever get. It’s like a group hug on steroids. 

She finds Luke in the center of the chaos, absolutely wrung out with tears and laughter, and it’s like gravity, like fate, like whatever you want to call it, pulling them both together. She wraps her arms around his neck and feels his hands warm on her waist, his solid arms locked tight around her. And she’s home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope this ending was worth all the heartache of the middle bits. Thank you so much to everyone who commented through the posting process, it actually gave me so many ideas for edits to the later chapters. Hope you enjoyed!

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to encouragement and proofreading from my (literary) Greek chorus, which consists of c, causeways, and swaps55, who enable me in all things.


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